Travel with Indigo

What began as an inadvertent stop, required by the need to discharge some old crew and take on a few new, became one of the most memorable of the entire voyage. Here is the story of our month long visit.

Oman in 1970 was a weak, poor, backward country ruled ineptly by a feudal tyrant, Sultan Al Sayyid Said bin Taimur. Within an area equal to that of New Mexico, there were just eight miles of paved roads, one hospital and one school. Its literacy rate was five percent. Tribes in the interior were in open rebellion fueled by ancient rivalries and by avarice arising from the expectation that oil would soon be discovered. In the southern region of Dhofar along the border with Yemen, a communist inspired insurgency had gained a foothold and was advancing.

In that year, the Sultan’s only son, Quaboos bin Said, arising from the torpor of his virtual house arrest in the palace at Salalah, overthrew his father in a coup with the aid of the Sultan’s own personal guard and a detachment of British troops and banished him into exile. The deposed sultan was only the latest victim in a long bloody tradition of betrayal and treachery among the Arab tribes, commonly orchestrated by close family members. Father knows best is a sentiment that evidently doesn’t enjoy popular acceptance in the Arab world. (By the way, throughout this blog entry I use the term Arab in its narrowest sense as one who is a native of the Arabian Peninsula and speaks Arabic.)

The new Sultan, who had been educated at England’s Sandhurst military academy, among others, promptly began what must surely be, along with that of the other Persian Gulf countries, one of the world’s most dramatic transformations.  It is today an absolute monarchy, a police state over which the Sultan has tightfisted control. He has appointed himself head of the ministries of state, defense and, of course, finance and is deeply involved in the affairs of these and in much else. Nothing of consequence happens in Oman without the Sultan’s approval.

But to the good fortune of its people he has turned out to be a wise, though by no means a selfless, ruler, a despot of mostly benevolent instincts, who, using a growing stream of oil and tax revenues, has turned the country into a modern state. Its several thousands of miles of highways and roads, its bridges, ports, electric transmission and generating and water producing facilities are as fine as any in the US, many better. There are modern schools and universities teaching eager young Omanis the finer points of engineering, technology, medicine, and commerce.

Yet, unlike Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Oman has striven to preserve its unique culture, at least to the extent that’s possible in the face of galloping modernity. It has few glittering towers and no claims at all to have the world’s largest this or that. Omani people, quite differently from other Arabs, are a warm, genial, easily smiling lot with a reluctant tolerance for Western ways. They as a rule don’t drink alcohol but don’t really mind if you do so long as you don’t make a fool of yourself and confine it to your hotel or a few licensed restaurants and bars.  Drunk driving will land you in jail for at least two days for a first offense provided it’s minor, longer if there are aggravating circumstances. In Muscat are a few nightclubs of a rather tame sort, nothing like the wide open Dubai scene.  Local friends told me that when travelling with your wife in the more puritanical interior you had best have your marriage license along if you plan on staying in the same hotel room or else be prepared to pay for two rooms.

As most Arabs, Omanis tend toward prudishness in the matter of dress asking that men and women cover themselves decently in public. I always found it odd that in a hot and along the coast humid climate men don’t wear shorts or even short-sleeved shirts. Instead they wear the long white traditional Arab robe, called a dishdasha, topped off with a peculiar, richly embroidered brimless pillbox hat borrowed from Africa during the time when Zanzibar was an Oman colony or on occasion a turban with one or another color and pattern. Indeed, these constitute the official uniform for all government service except police and military. For footwear, open toed sandals are all but universal. At ceremonial events, Omani men wear a decorative belt into which they insert the iconic curve bladed dagger called a khanjar. Omani men tend to be more stylish than other Arabs. While they are most frequently seen wearing white robes, they also wear robes in muted shades of yellow, red, gray and brown, all solids, often trimmed with piping of contrasting color, and there is no end to the color and pattern of those pillbox hats. Young men seem to prefer robes in bold but generally colorless plaids.

Women in public nearly always cover themselves from the crown of their head to the bottom of their ankles in the black and thus needlessly uncomfortable robe called an abaya. Many single women choose to cover their entire face with a black scarf leaving only an eye slit showing while married women may reveal their face. The black abaya is required dress inside a mosque but otherwise its color, style and even whether to wear it at all is a matter of choice.

Twenty or so years ago, and in the more conservative inland areas still today, all Omani women wore brightly colored and intricately patterned abayas. But then, perhaps following the lead of Manhattan styles, the women of Muscat and other coastal regions all turned to black. It was a change in fashion made entirely by choice not by the dictate of Islam or by the command of their husbands.

When Omani women meet at special social occasions involving family and friends, the abaya is not to be found. Instead they are outfitted in stylish bejeweled dresses, costly shoes and bags to match that would be the envy of any American woman. These are also often worn underneath the abaya and thus seen only by her and her husband. While wandering through the shopping malls and souks of Oman and the UAE, I always wondered how there could be so many shops selling ladies clothing, shoes and makeup when there were no women to be seen wearing the stuff. Only later did Omani friends reveal the (hidden) truth, especially when they complained of their wife’s expensive tastes.

The preference for a black abaya when combined with Islamic/Arab prudery makes for an interesting scene around the resort swimming pool. There you can see ex-pats or tourists in bikinis swimming alongside Omanis fully draped in black abayas used in lieu of a swimsuit.  I myself find the bikini to be the preferable item of swimwear for attractive young women. For others, in particular the woman who is charitably described as well fed, the abaya makes an appealing article of public clothing. I like to think of it as an Arabian moo-moo.

As Arab despots go, Sultan Quaboos is an unusual fellow to say the least. Shortly after the coup in which he took power, he married his first cousin in keeping with Omani tradition, and a few years after that took the rare step of divorcing her. Although childless, he never remarried and has no heirs. Those who know him well will tell you, what all Omanis know but wish not to discuss, that he is gay. Although homosexuality is common among Arab men, for a culture that throughout its history has celebrated the fierce desert warrior, this must surely provoke consternation.

Those who have been in his presence many times say that he is small in stature, diffident, soft spoken, and dislikes giving speeches or even speaking much at all. Compensating for these characteristics, though, is his seemingly genuine concern for the welfare of the people he governs, his sufficient if not incandescent intellect, his gift for co-opting and thus making friends of his former enemies, and a shrewd generosity. In reading of his rise to power and ensuing achievements, I always had the sense that here is a master practitioner of political manipulation and intrigue of whom Niccolo Machiavelli would have been particularly proud. Given the long and ugly history of betrayal and treachery among Arab leaders, his long tenure in office is testament enough to his skills and perhaps to a touch of justifiable paranoia. As if to confirm still further his mastery of Middle East perfidy, his security service has uncovered in recent years two nascent attempts by radicals to overthrow the sultanate by violent means and install an Islamic state.

A modern map depicting each of the seven United Arab Emirates as well as Oman is an inexplicable jumble of enclaves, exclaves and twisted boundaries.  Bits and pieces of these two countries are separated from the rest, laying about helter-skelter for no apparent reason.  Not even the most grotesque of America’s gerrymandered congressional districts is as confused.

You can drive north up the coast of the Gulf of Oman from Muscat to a point near the tip of the Arabian Peninsula where you pass into a detached bit of the emirate of Sharjah.  Just thirty or so miles further along, you come to another unhitched piece, this one from the emirate of Fujairah. Continuing along, you reach another severed chunk of Sharjah adjacent to a postage stamp exclave of Oman, then some more of Sharjah, Fujairah, and another tiny piece of Sharjah.

Finally, you reach the spectacular mountains of the Musandom Peninsula, mostly but not entirely under the sovereignty of Oman. If you were to set off across this peninsula, you would encounter stand-alone pieces of the emirates of Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah, and Umm Al Qaiwain. What, you may ask, as I did, is the source of this bafflement?

It is the result of a devil’s brew that includes a long and bloody history of tribal feuds and shifting allegiances, avarice from the prospect of oil revenues and the skillful skullduggery of the British Foreign Office and Western oil companies. In just one among many examples, a long and bitter war between Dubai and Abu Dhabi over oil rich domains was not concluded until the sixties. None of the boundaries in the region were firmly established until the early 1970s and then only with the aid of the British.

No understanding of this part of the world would be complete without reading the incomparable story of Wilfred Thesiger’s travels through much of the Arabian Peninsula from 1945 to 1950. In his book, Arabian Sands, he recounts his journeys by camel and on foot while living among the Bedu (more commonly today called Bedouin). Using them as his guides, he crossed the Empty Quarter, the world’s largest sand desert, twice, and roamed through Yemen, Oman, large parts of Saudi Arabia and what are today the Emirates all before oil was discovered and the SUV replaced the camel. He witnessed firsthand the startling savagery of desert justice, the rampant thievery, the hatreds, jealousies and age old blood feuds of the desert and coastal tribes. At one point, as he attempted to cross a part of Oman, his life was threatened by the uncle (if I have that right) of my new friend, Zahran Al Rugeishi, solely for the reason that he was a Christian infidel. It was neither the first nor the last time he would encounter religious hatred.

To characterize the Sultan of Oman as benevolent is not quite to paint a faithful picture. He is said by the locals to arrogate to himself something like ten percent of the country’s revenue for his own entertainment, but this estimate comes from people who are handsomely paid for their loyalty. Other, and I believe more accurate, estimates suggest an amount closer to fifty percent goes into his piggy bank. With half, or even a meager ten percent, of about twenty billion dollars a year, you can have a lot of fun.

In addition to ten enormous palaces scattered about the country, each approached along miles of lavishly manicured, tastefully illuminated and flagpole-lined boulevards, he has an unknown number of villas here and there in other parts of the world. The Al Said, his largest yacht in a fleet of about thirty vessels, is at 324 feet the third largest “state-owned” yacht in the world. He keeps it docked in the ancient town of Muttrah, just a few miles down the road from the marina where Indigo was berthed, fully staffed should he wish to travel on short notice.

Sharing runways and flight control apparatus with the proletariat’s international airport, there is an entire separate airport, complete with verdant landscaping and handsome design, called of course the Royal Airport. Its hangers are filled with his numerous private planes, also fully staffed and ready to go. There is of course the Royal Air Force to escort him should he feel the need.

As one who enjoys classical music, he began the Oman Symphony Orchestra from scratch staffed only with Omani musicians who until they were recruited had never played a note. When he travels, they accompany him to provide private and ceremonial entertainment. Evidently the Sultan’s tastes have not risen to sufficient heights of refinement for him to appreciate the dulcet tones of American country music, but it’s still early in the country’s march toward a more advanced civilization.

There is now under construction in the diplomatic area of Muscat an opera house, which upon its completion will almost certainly be among the world’s most magnificent and a superb venue in which the Sultan can enjoy another of the fine arts in which he is keenly interested. Being sensible people, though, Omanis, upon hearing their first operatic performance, are likely to want the building converted to other more pleasurable pursuits. Rock concerts, monster truck events, demolition derbies, professional wrestling matches, and Grand Old Opry shows are just a few of the many possibilities, though, as I say, Oman has a way to go up the civilization ladder before they may find these appealing.

Not a single commercial or government building is built in Oman without the Sultan’s personal approval, though from what I’ve seen of many of these he ought not to make too big a point of this. The story is told of one modern five-star hotel that was built with his approval but painted a color he disliked. He ordered it repainted a more appealing (to him) hue, and it was. He dislikes the sound of beeping car horns so common elsewhere in the Middle East, so all over Muscat are signs forbidding horn tooting. Ports, highways, neighborhoods, airports, libraries, mosques, schools, universities and much more have been thoughtfully named by the Sultan for himself confirming to his countrymen what a really swell guy he is.

If in your next life you are offered your choice from a list of vocations, I heartily recommend that of Sultan of Oman. Easy job, good pay, lots of palaces and other perks, everybody laughs at your jokes, your own army, navy and air force, great boats and planes, you own the internal revenue service into whose collections you can dip whenever you like, and about all the power you could want. But as the Sultan’s father’s experience, and the experience of most other Arab sheiks, emirs, kings, and assorted potentates attests, watch your back, particularly at family gatherings, where sons and brothers should be the objects of deepest suspicion.

A mile from the marina where Indigo was docked is a particularly fine and notable hotel, one with a deserved place in the book, “1,000 Places to See before You Die”. The Al Bustan Palace Hotel, as it is known, was recently reopened after being closed two years for major renovations and is the place in whose wonderful piano bar I came to know Mr. Rao, the bar’s long time manager. As an irrepressible raconteur and master networker, he introduced me to three fine gentlemen of upper Omani society, Zahran al Rugeishi, Akeel Mullalah, and Fahmi al Harthi from all of whom I learned much about Oman and its people.

Zahran, like half of all working Omanis, is employed by one of the federal ministries though just which he would never say.  He has traveled widely and along the way mastered several languages including Spanish, Italian and English.  One day after we had become casually acquainted, he paid me the considerable honor of inviting me to his home for a traditional Omani breakfast to be followed by a guided tour of his modest village, called Izky, the historically important town of Nizwa and some other nearby attractions.

Rare is the man who requires wine with his breakfast, so for this reason alone when dining with the abstemious Muslims the morning meal is strongly to be preferred. We sat on the floor in the men’s sitting room of Zahran’s and Aziza’s handsome home with a traditional Arab morning meal spread before us. There was a soupy yellow lentil dish, stacks of freshly baked Arabian bread of a sort that when folded properly serves both as a pusher and as a spoon, piles of various dates and fruits, another style of bread this one more doughy and eaten with honey poured over it, and a dish of a classic sweet, fudge-like desert called halwa, made from dates, brown sugar, cardamom and other ingredients if memory serves.

All of this is eaten using only the fingers thus presenting a challenge to the Western diner whose mother spent years demanding that he keep his hands either in his lap or grasped around a utensil. No Arab meal is possible without coffee, the ever-present elixir of welcome. They drink it from demitasse cups and mix it with cardamom which gives it a sweet but pleasant, somewhat exotic flavor, although it’s not nearly as strong as I had thought it might be.

I met Zahran’s father, a distinguished man with a fine gray beard who was dressed in a white robe, carried the traditional camel stick, and wore around his waist an artfully made silver belt into which was inserted a very old and intricately decorated silver Omani curve bladed dagger, a necessary possession for any adult male. Zahran’s three handsome sons, ages ranging from eight to five, added a note of liveliness.

Electricity, only recently arrived in the village, is quite costly and so is used sparingly. Though the new house has a few air conditioning units of the wall banger variety, as do most of the finer homes, they are used only at night in the bedrooms to facilitate sleep. Prior to this, it was common for families to sleep in the open on the roof during summer.

During our breakfast, the ACs were not running, windows remained closed and no fans were in use with the predictable and uncomfortable result that the temperature was in the neighborhood of 85 degrees and the air still. For Omanis, this is quite normal, for me it was nearly stifling.

After breakfast, we drove into the newly restored historic town of Nizwa, once the center of open rebellion by the area’s tribes against the present Sultan’s father. Zahran’s uncle, I believe it was, served as governor of the province during those times, and his family was accordingly deeply involved in the effort to overthrow the sultanate and install an Islamic form of government. The rebellion was put down with the assistance of the always shrewd British whose RAF dropped a few smallish bombs on some nearby villages just to focus the minds of their recalcitrant citizens.  Now, he says, all is forgiven. The new Sultan is doing a fine job of bringing a better life to the Omani people (for which read sharing the oil loot) and for this he and his tribe, the al Rugeishis, are grateful, never mind that the Sultan has lots of guns and the people none.

Any doubts that Oman was once rived by tribal anarchy are put to rest by the briefest of travels around the country. There is no town, village or dusty corner that doesn’t have its fort and accompanying watch towers from which tribes kept an eye out for the raiders from other tribes intent on stealing their camels or goats or settling a festering blood feud. Indeed, these forts and redoubts, now tastefully restored, are something of a tourist attraction. I never came upon such forts in all my driving around Oman that I wasn’t taken with the thought that I had stumbled upon the film set of an Errol Flynn movie. Surrounded as they invariably are by acres of densely clustered date palms and sited upon strategic high ground, they evoke exotic images like those from the forties film, Beau Geste.

Their architecture with its emblematic crenellations remains the dominant theme of Omani residential and commercial design. When the low wall surrounding the flat roof of your new home features a series of battlements from which rifles could be fired at attackers, and all the homes in all of the other neighborhoods are similarly equipped, it says much about your forebears.

After touring the particularly fine and important fort at Nizwa, we traveled to the top of nearby Jabal Al Akhdar using all the gears in my four-wheel drive SUV, eventually reaching an elevation of nearly 8,000 feet. There in cooling breezes we could look out over the sun drenched desiccated valleys and scattered villages far below.

Zahran’s official travels were to take him to London for the next month, so at the foot of the mountain we parted ways agreeing to keep in touch and meet up again somewhere in the Med.

The next friend I first encountered at the Al Bustan Palace Hotel’s piano bar was Akeel Mullalah with the Oman Ministry of State most recently posted as Ambassador to South Korea. He and his lovely and quite modernist wife, along with their bright, engaging eleven-year old son Faisal, came aboard Indigo for dinner and long talks about our respective cultures.  They in turn kindly invited me to join them as their guest at the new Diplomat Club, a private beachfront enclave of dining and sporting whose membership is limited to the diplomatic corps of the many countries with delegations in Oman. Both Akeel and his wife are thoroughly westernized but continue to adhere to most of the customs and practices of Islam, to revere their country and to remain hopeful of its future.

Akeel thinks of himself as an entrepreneur, though one with the curious preparation of a lifetime in government service. In conversation, he comes at you as the buzz saw comes at the log, which at first is off putting but soon becomes tolerable enough. It was clear from the first moments of our meeting that he wishes me to invest, or to convince my friends to invest, in what he perceives as profitable opportunities in Oman and, I assume, to retain him as my fee-paid agent for this purpose. Thus our relationship quickly took on what was for me the unwanted cast of profit seeking. So resolute was Akeel in his pursuit of this end that I was seldom able to shift gears to other and for me more broadening topics. I recall thinking that if I ever needed a man with the tenacity of a junkyard dog here was the guy.

Fahmi Khalid Al-Harthi is the editor-in-chief of several slick tourist magazines and of the English language daily newspaper, the Oman Observer. On the night we met, he was at the Al Bustan having just collected a high honor for his professional achievements a memorial of which he carried proudly. His appearance and manner are that of a kindly university professor, something he should know about having spent what sounds like a fun-filled seven years as a student obtaining a degree in political science from a Cairo university. We hit it off right away and quickly became good friends in that fortuitous way that happens when you travel.

Although he was reluctant to talk about his own convictions, Fahmi is a pious man though, as all Arabs I encountered, not one to proselytize. He adheres to Oman’s prevailing faith, the Ibadi sect of Sunni Islam, found only in Oman and parts of North Africa, whose most distinguishing feature for the Westerner is its tolerance of other beliefs. There are in Muscat places of worship to accommodate Protestant, Roman Catholic, Hindu, even Shiite Muslim and other religions though not, as you might guess, Judaism.  Omanis, in stark contrast to some other Arabs, are also more tolerant, or maybe I should instead say less intolerant, of what they perceive to be our Western corruptions, like drinking to excess, engaging gleefully in licentiousness, and wearing clothing that fails fully to envelop the body. Sanctimonious is not a word that would occur to you in describing most Omanis.

At several dinners on Indigo, Fahmi and I explored our differences, his hopes and fears for Oman, his sense of its future, his family and tribe and much more. I found him to be a thoughtful man whose opinions are carefully formed and artfully expressed.

Of all that I learned from him, I would have to say the most important was his notion that the seemingly stark differences that separate much of the Arab world today from the West, and that separate its own constituent sects from each other, are merely transitional. It is quite clear to him that in the span of just one or perhaps two generations most of these differences will either disappear altogether or become greatly attenuated.

His opinion on this matter does not, however, extend to the extraordinary case of the Wahabi sect. Found mostly in Saudi Arabia, their unforgiving rectitude is the modern Islamic equivalent of the priggish Puritans who once inflicted themselves on America. It is only somewhat reassuring to know that their most severe doctrines and practices are not widely accepted by other Islamic sects.

I met Fahmi at his home one morning from which we departed on a wonderful day long trip through the region of his youth with him serving as my personal guide. We stopped first at the tiny village outside of Rustaq where he spent much of his childhood and there met his aunt and a few cousins of the Al-Harthi tribe.

The aunt, a grizzled lady of about 80 years, was seated on the floor in the entry hall of her modest home sorting through a bundle of freshly picked dates. Outside and inside temperatures were hardly different, the former about 110, the latter 95.  Wisely, she sat in front of a fan turned to its highest speed. Just behind her home were the remains of her and her husband’s former residence, built in the ancient manner using sun dried mud to cement and encase stones. Its rooms were tiny, no larger than a modern walk-in closet, the ceilings high to dissipate the heat. Fahmi said the home was more than four hundred years old and had been in his family all that time.

Close by there was a grove of date palms watered in the traditional manner by an open sluiceway fed from a well.  The design and building of these sluiceways is done exclusively by a single tribe using exactly the same techniques that have been employed for a thousand years. Though revered by Omanis as an important link with their ancient culture, the design is badly flawed as the water, a scarce and costly resource in the desert climate, is exposed to considerable evaporation. Modern pipes would be far preferable.

In all of my visits to small villages, what struck me most was the absence of people walking about. It was just too hot in the summer. The small groupings of modest homes, with the inevitable mosque and a few commercial establishments only a few steps up the ladder from the lemonade stand, were not so much sleepy as comatose. On Fridays, however, men, and only men, could be seen in traditional dress walking along the streets to the mosque, a veritable riot of activity by contrast.

We drove next to visit Fahmi’s mother who still lives in the same home in which she bore and raised her family. Situated in a walled-in compound in which there is also the fine much newer home of Fahmi’s brother, it is small by modern standards but clean, tidy and comfortable. I met the elderly lady in the men’s sitting room where we were also joined by Fahmi’s 17-year old son who brought in piles and piles of dates of various color and taste, assorted fruits, and of course coffee. Upon my departure she insisted I take along a large box of fresh dates only recently harvested from her own trees.

Our last stop was at a natural spring boiling up inexplicably from the base of a dry desert mountain on which there is not a sprig of green growing anywhere. It is a centuries old oasis that once supported the surrounding villages and has now been made into a public park surrounded by groves of date palms. On the day of our visit, it was crowded with families, their shrieking kids frolicking in the cool stream.

Oases of this sort are found throughout the Arabian Peninsula and at each is a village often dating to as late as the birth of Christ. They were the functional equivalent of today’s gas stations, and knowledge of their location was crucial to survival, especially for the nomadic Bedu. Some of these are found in the midst of many square miles of arid, sand blown deserts, while others are in and around the valleys and deep gorges of the mountains. Why water should come bubbling up at these odd places from far below the most inhospitable of terrains, I could not begin to say.

Fahmi is one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. He gave me books and magazines on Oman, most of which I’ve now read. But more lastingly he presented me with three custom tailored dishdasha robes: light brown heavy cotton for the winter, white light cotton with white embroidered piping for daily summer wear, and eggshell cotton poplin with gold embroidered piping for formal occasions. He also gave me a very fine handmade Omani pillbox hat and a wonderful cashmere and silk turban. Wearing any of these, I will (almost) look like an official citizen of Oman. Fahmi also gave me an ancient Syrian arrowhead he acquired while on a visit there. It dates from the time before Christ.

Wishing to see more of a country I had come to like very much, I took an hour and a half flight from Muscat to the southern resort town of Salalah where I rented a four-wheel drive SUV and promptly set out to explore the nearby Dhofar Mountains and desert.  After a two-hour drive north, I came to the remote, dusty town of Thumrayt, where I stopped for lunch. It was around 110 degrees outside, so I tried to find a restaurant with air conditioning but at first had no luck.  None of them offered anything more than a few fans yet were filled with laborers, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, chomping away, on hot food no less. Finally, I located the only air conditioned restaurant in town though it had only a single inadequate wall banger aided feebly by an overhead fan. In such a setting, my hopes for a memorable meal were not high, so I was happily surprised when the proprietor set before me one of the most mouth-pleasing lunches of my Oman visit thus far.

I noted that I was the only diner using utensils. All the others followed their traditional custom of using their fingers to hoist or shovel food into their mouth. To the Westerner this is likely to bring up memories of fraternity house food fights, though here the diners carefully washed after the meal and returned to gainful employment.

After lunch, I walked next door to a ramshackle bank branch where I converted dollars to Omani Reals then drove westward into the desert over a fine new paved highway on which mine was almost the only vehicle. My destination, 120 miles away, was Al Mazyuna, the border outpost for crossing into Yemen. I knew the country is said to be dangerous, most especially for Americans, but my Omani friends had told me that it is one of their favorite places on earth, a place of quiet beauty and endless charm, and so convinced me to attempt a visit.

Oman’s topography is the result over many millions of years of ocean flooding, violent upheavals, fractures, erosion and deposition. As a result, it is today a scenic wonderland, often of unspeakable beauty, though one that is almost entirely lacking in natural vegetation. It’s as if you took the mountains and deserts of Arizona and Nevada and stripped from them every bit of topsoil and everything green. What’s left is a scabrous flinty landscape in hues of gray, blue gray, ochre, pale red and peach.

It was through this country that I drove, past soaring mountains, over low hills, down into gorges and gaps scoured by ancient rivers. I passed through a wide and perfectly flat desert plain on which thousands of camels roamed, seeking the odd bit of verdure for nutrition. This was, and remains today, a part of the ancient route used by the Bedu tribes as they made their way in summer from the vast inland deserts to the shores near Salalah. Along the way, I spotted black goat hair tents pitched by modern Bedu in the open desert, flaps closed. At nearly 120 degrees, it was searing outside my vehicle, so just how they could endure such heat inside a dark tent I can’t even venture a guess. In other places, more modern minded families, apparently descended from the upper reaches of the Bedu intelligence scale, were camped in lighter canvas tents pitched under shade trees with SUV’s parked outside.

At the Yemen border, I was aided by a guard who had lived for a time in Miami and spoke passable English. He checked me out of Oman and drove me in his official truck the few miles to the Yemen checkpoint, where he insisted on serving as my interpreter.  Contrasted with the Omanis, the Yemeni border guards were slovenly and ill-tempered. They all had their cheeks stuffed with ghat, a mild narcotic made from the bark of a local tree, and sat around in their sweltering offices most of them squatted on their haunches. Dementia seemed to hang in the air.

After much animated conversation, the Omani guard said the Yemenis refused to allow me to enter the country because I had no visa and the man who issues these (read collects the bribe) would not return until 8pm. Besides, they said, there is a war going on between separatist elements from South Yemen and the Yemeni government and another between several warlords. They also said that Al Quaida is actively searching for Western tourists on whom they wished to inflict punishment for being infidels, like me for instance. Accordingly, they said, it’s very dangerous to drive where I wished to go. He said the bad guys would stop my car, force me out of it, and steal it leaving me stranded in the desert if I was lucky, simply shoot me if not. When I asked if he could at least stamp my passport, he refused and sent me rudely back to Oman.

Disconsolate from missing out on a part of Yemen that had been highly recommended to me and that I had read about in Thesiger’s book, I turned my car around and headed back toward Salalah, once again driving across the wonderful desert and mountains of Dhofar. Upon reaching the coast, I drove to Wadi Dirbat, an oasis fed by a lethargic stream now turned into a local park.  Families were picnicking on its banks, kids splashing in its stagnant pools.

Oman’s landscape is characterized by its mountains, gravel plains and deserts, coastal plains, and wadis. This last feature is a well defined dried river bed marked by the rock strewn bed itself, the beds of tributaries that once flowed into it, and a meandering course. There are thousands of them spread all across the country, and their names and locations are well known to Omanis. On the sporadic and rare occasions when rain falls, these quickly fill and become raging torrents whose containment is a major engineering problem in Oman. Many villages I visited were protected from these cascades by thick concrete revetments or banks of stone rip-rap. Despite these and other efforts, every year hapless tourists, particularly those with ill-chosen camp sites, die from flash floods in these wadis.

Salalah is noted all across the Arabian Peninsula as the place to be during the summer monsoons. Around late July to early August, climatic conditions and a peculiar geography combine to cause wispy dark clouds along the coast which, when they encounter the nearby mountain range, result in rain. Nowhere else in the world that I’m aware of is rain an occasion for visiting the beach for the purpose of standing in it and celebrating its arrival, but that is just what happens in Salalah.

As soon as word gets out that the season has begun, brief though it is, the hotels promptly fill with Arabs who have had quite enough, thank you, of radiant blue sky, relentless searing heat and abundant sunshine. Marked as it is by strong and persistent winds blowing onshore and by thundering surf, the rainy season is not conducive to swimming or even wading. Most Arabs can’t swim in any event. So people just go there almost literally to stand in the rain.

Standing in a downpour, whatever may be its appeal to the locals, did not for me hold much promise. It’s the sort of thing that back in Florida is just not done much, even on a golf course. So I hopped in my SUV and drove down the coast to the forlorn village of Mirbat, once a thriving center of the frankincense trade and there stumbled upon a restaurant that, judging from the number of cars out front, must be one of its better places to dine. As the menu was in Arabic, and nobody in the place spoke English I concluded that tourists don’t get down this way often which suited me just fine. I held up the menu, closed my eyes and pointed to a dish, which when it arrived turned out to be one of the finer meals I had in Oman. I still don’t know what it was, have no idea, nor do I even know from what animal its contents were derived before landing on my plate soaking in a stew of unidentifiable (by me) herbs and spices, but it sure was good.

Frankincense trees are found throughout this part of Oman and their sap is still harvested for processing into perfume. But the aroma is far too powerful and sickly for the Western taste. Thesiger reports in his book that Arabs in the desert after defecating clean themselves with sand (now that’s hardy!) then use the smoke from burning frankincense to improve their aroma. It’s desert Air Wick. For the person who goes many weeks between ablutions, and more importantly for those who find themselves in the company of such a person, I’m sure it has its appeal. But beyond that I can’t recommend the stuff.

Upon returning to Muscat and getting some rest, I traveled by car northwest along the Gulf of Oman coast, passing through various emirates before arriving at the dramatic scenery of the Musandam Peninsula. At the extreme end of this geographic apostrophe is the Strait of Hormuz across which, just forty miles away, is Iran.

A few miles north of the Musandam town of Dibba, the paved road gives way to a graded gravel surface that winds its way up a wadi into the mountains. A short distance up this road I came upon a modest sign indicating that I had arrived at my destination, the Six Senses Resort at Zigy Bay, where I would stay two nights.

Only recently completed, it is the latest rendition of the current vogue in resort hotels, known generally as eco-resorts, or as I prefer to call them, primitive camps. In exchange for the payment of very large sums of money, these places offer you the opportunity to live for a short time pretty much as some specific tribe of indigenous people did about a hundred years ago. At Zigy Bay, this tribe is the mountain Bedu.

Upon arrival, my car was parked in a dusty ramshackle shed of the type in which you would expect to find lawn maintenance equipment were there any lawns. I and my bag were loaded into an SUV in which I was driven up the steep face of a mountain on narrow unpaved switchbacks, over the crest from which there was a magnificent view of the tiny beach below and the Gulf beyond, and then down more switchbacks to the resort nestled in a corner of its eponymous bay.

Anybody who happened to stumble upon this resort would quickly form the opinion that it was a Bedu encampment which had been abandoned long ago, possibly as the result of a bloody tribal battle from which it never recovered, so artfully does its design and the choice of its building materials mimic the primitive motif.

My room, sited directly on the beach, housed not a single piece of furnishing that did not closely resemble something which had been purchased second-hand from a defunct summer camp for boys. Its plumbing hardware was painted a flat black and felt to the touch as if sand had been generously mixed in with the paint. Visual screens, ceilings, and shaded areas were all built of desiccated and unpainted sticks and twigs gathered nearby just as the Bedu once built these. There was no landscaping save the planted date palms, no hardened pathways for walking around the place, and little in the way of outdoor lighting. Walls were made from chunks of stone which, until they were cemented into place, had been laying about the site. Nowhere in the entire resort was there a painted surface.

In short, the resort was exceedingly inexpensive to build, an obvious fact which the guest was asked to join in celebrating as his contribution to environmental bliss. Just to ram home the point, each room comes equipped with a copy of a gloomy and wildly errant rant by none other than Al Gore, the eco-equivalent of the Gideon Bible or complementary Quran. That the environment might have been better served had the resort not been built at all seems not to have occurred to its owners. That its revenues come almost entirely from guests who make their living by supplying a goodly part of the world’s hydrocarbons is a wonderful irony and a testament both to its developer’s sense of humor and to their outsized hypocrisy. The whole experience was an extended exercise in eco-narcissism the likes of which I have seldom encountered.

My few fellow guests were mostly snotty, over fed youthful Emirati halfwits there to spend Sheik Dad’s money as foolishly as I was spending my own. It was time to move on.

From Zigy Bay, I drove north up the wadi over a poorly graded surface barely wide enough for two cars to pass, enclosed by sheer parched cliffs. Here and there were the authentic ancient hovels of Bedu goatherds constructed in much the same manner and of the same materials as my resort room, which made me regret that I had not stayed in these and thus saved a lot of money. They were not air conditioned, however, and water would have had to be fetched from a well.

An hour’s drive later, after passing through deep canyons barely wider than the car and over high mountain peaks from which there were stunning panoramas, I came upon an Omani military checkpoint with lowered crossing arm. Here I was told that going further up the Musandom was not permitted by the military and taking the alternate route also was not allowed because my Emirates visa didn’t reflect the proper stamp. Despite my pleading, I had to retrace my drive, pass out of Oman into the Emirates and travel on fine new highways to my destination, the Bab al Shams resort in the Dubai desert.

On the way there, south of Dubai, I passed by a square mile or so of desert which had been divided into many enclosed pens in which camels were bred, raised and trained solely for the purpose of racing them against one another. The sport in Arabia is no less popular than is horse racing in America, with the additional similarity that millions are paid for the best animals. I also drove past the enormous stables where the Sheik of Dubai breeds and trains his race horses.

The resort is an older established place, something of an institution among the people who know these things, and was a decided improvement over Zigy Bay. Among its amenities is a well-known outdoor theme restaurant where you can sit on the desert floor, eat local foods, watch belly dancers, ride camels, buy cheesy souvenirs and the like. Though grateful for the opportunity, I passed it up and instead spent my time in the air conditioning.

The next day I drove two hours (one more than necessary because I got lost) to the surprisingly agreeable, and in the midst of the desert discordantly verdant, city of Al Ayn in Abu Dhabi.  It is the ancestral home of Sheik Zayed al Nayan, former ruler of Abu Dhabi and founder of the United Arab Emirates, who lived there in the family palace until moving in 1965 to more commodious accommodations. Oil money was flowing in after all.

Calling the old place a palace is an exaggeration. It comprises an area of no more than two acres surrounded by a ten-foot stone wall through which there is but a single entry with a massive gate. His and his family’s modest former living quarters are on the second floor to which the sole access is by way of a narrow staircase, the better to deter potential assassins. This sensible feature is a reflection, and daily reminder, of the violent untimely end to which sheiks seem particularly susceptible. Of the fourteen previous rulers of Abu Dhabi, only two had died peacefully in power of natural causes. Eight had been murdered and four driven out, all in consequence of rebellions instigated within the family.

Just to remind us of this past, one of the Sheik’s sixteen sons, brother of the current ruler, was in the news recently for having severely beaten, whipped, jabbed repeatedly with an electric cattle prod and run over in his SUV an unfortunate man who he accused of misdealing.

The Al Ayn Museum, once I found it amidst all the new roads being built, was a worthwhile stop. It traced the cultural history of the Abu Dhabi and Emirati people and some of their dress, beliefs, and practices, though it glossed over their habit of engaging in pointless tribal wars, their talent for treachery, their rampant camel thievery, and their pervasive religious bigotry. Only oil has saved them from a secure place in world history’s backwater. I much prefer the people of Oman to these.

Back aboard Indigo, we began making preparations for our coming passage through the pirate infested Gulf of Aden, the subject of the next blog.